XIV

Eliot's Pulpit

OUR SUNDAYS,
at
Blithedale, were not ordinarily
kept with such rigid observance as might have
befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims, whose
high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered
ourselves, we had taken up, and were carrying it
onward and aloft, to a point which they never
dreamed of attaining.

On that
hallowed day, it is true, we rested from
our labors. Our oxen, relieved from their
week-day yoke, roamed at large through the
pasture; each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close
beside his mate, and continuing to acknowledge,
from the force of habit and sluggish sympathy, the
union which the taskmaster had imposed for his own
hard ends. As for us, human yoke-fellows, chosen
companions of toil, whose hoes had clinked
together throughout the week, we wandered off, in
various directions, to enjoy our interval of
repose. Some, I believe, went devoutly to the
village-church. Others, it may be, ascended a
city or a country-pulpit, wearing the clerical
robe with so much dignity that you would scarcely
have suspected the yeoman's frock to have been
flung off, only since milking-time. Others took
long rambles among the rustic lanes and by-paths,
pausing to look at black, old farm-houses, with
their sloping roofs; and at the modern cottage, so
like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or
sorrow could have no scope within; and at the more
pretending villa, with its range of wooden
columns, supporting the needless insolence of a
great portico. Some betook themselves into the
wide, dusky barn, and lay there, for hours
together, on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks
and the shadows strove together--these to make the
barn solemn, those to make it cheerful--and both
were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a
cheery anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing,
as they darted toand-fro among the golden rules of
sunshine. And others went a little way into the
woods, and threw themselves on Mother Earth,
pillowing their heads on a heap of moss, the green
decay of an old log; and dropping asleep, the
humble-bees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about
their ears, causing the slumberers to twitch and
start, without awakening.

With Hollingsworth,
Zenobia, Priscilla, and
myself, it grew to be a custom to spend the
Sabbath-afternoon at a certain rock. It was known
to us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a
tradition that the venerable Apostle Eliot had
preached there, two centuries gone by, to an
Indian auditory. The old pine-forest, through
which the Apostle's voice was wont to sound, had
fallen, an immemorial time ago. But the soil,
being of the rudest and most broken surface, had
apparently never been brought under tillage; other
growths, maple, and beech, and birch, had
succeeded to the primeval trees; so that it was
still as wild a tract of woodland as the
great-great-great-great grandson of one of Eliot's
Indians (had any such posterity been in existence)
could have desired, for the site and shelter of
his wigwam. These after-growths, indeed, lose the
stately solemnity of the original forest. If left
in due neglect, however, they run into an
entanglement of softer wildness, among the
rustling leaves of which the sun can scatter
cheerfulness, as it never could among the
dark-browed pines.

The rock
itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a
shattered granite boulder, or heap of boulders,
with an irregular outline and many fissures, out
of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as
if the scanty soil, within those crevices, were
sweeter to their roots than any other earth. At
the base of the pulpit, the broken boulders
inclined towards each other, so as to form a
shallow cave, within which our little party had
sometimes found protection from a summer shower.
On the threshold, or just across it, grew a tuft
of pale columbines, in their season, and violets,
sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla was,
when we first knew her; children of the sun, who
had never seen their father, but dwelt among damp
mosses, though not akin to them. At the summit,
the rock was overshadowed by the canopy of a
birch-tree, which served as a sounding-board for
the pulpit. Beneath this shade, (with my eyes of
sense half shut, and those of the imagination
widely opened,) I used to see the holy Apostle of
the Indians, with the sunlight flickering down
upon him through the leaves, and glorifying his
figure as with the half-perceptible glow of a
transfiguration.

I the
more minutely describe the rock, and this
little Sabbath solitude, because Hollingsworth, at
our solicitation, often ascended Eliot's pulpit,
and--not exactly preached--but talked to us, his
few disciples, in a strain that rose and fell as
naturally as the wind's breath among the leaves of
the birch-tree. No other speech of man has ever
moved me like some of those discourses. It seemed
most pitiful--a positive calamity to the
world--that a treasury of golden thoughts should
thus be scattered, by the liberal handful, down
among us three, when a thousand hearers might have
been the richer for them; and Hollingsworth the
richer, likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes.
After speaking much or little, as might happen, he
would descend from his gray pulpit, and generally
fling himself at full length on the ground, face
downward. Meanwhile, we talked around him, on
such topics as were suggested by the discourse.

Since her
interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's
continual inequalities of temper had been rather
difficult for her friends to bear. On the first
Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had
clambered down from Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed
with great earnestness and passion, nothing short
of anger, on the injustice which the world did to
women, and equally to itself, by not allowing
them, in freedom and honor, and with the fullest
welcome, their natural utterance in public.

"It shall
not always be so!" cried she. "If I
live another year, I will lift up my own voice, in
behalf of woman's wider liberty."

"What matter
of ridicule do you find in this,
Miles Coverdale?" exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash
of anger in her eyes. "That smile, permit me to
say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling,
and shallow thought. It is my belief--yes, and my
prophecy, should I die before it happens--that,
when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will
be ten eloquent women, where there is now one
eloquent man. Thus far, no woman in the world has
ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole
mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast
bulk of society throttles us, as with two gigantic
hands at our throats! We mumble a few weak words,
and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You let
us write a little, it is true, on a limited range
of subjects. But the pen is not for woman. Her
power is too natural and immediate. It is with
the living voice, alone, that she can compel the
world to recognize the light of her intellect and
the depth of her heart!"

Now--though I
could not well say so to Zenobia--I
had not smiled from any unworthy estimate of
woman, or in denial of the claims which she is
beginning to put forth. What amused and puzzled
me, was the fact, that women, however
intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet
themselves about the rights or wrongs of their
sex, unless their own individual affections chance
to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They
are not natural reformers, but become such by the
pressure of exceptional misfortune. I could
measure Zenobia's inward trouble, by the animosity
with which she now took up the general quarrel of
woman against man.

"I will
give you leave, Zenobia," replied I, "to
fling your utmost scorn upon me, if you ever hear
me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the widest
liberty which woman has yet dreamed of. I would
give her all she asks, and add a great deal more,
which she will not be the party to demand, but
which men, if they were generous and wise, would
grant of their own free motion. For instance, I
should love dearly--for the next thousand years,
at least--to have all government devolve into the
hands of women. I hate to be ruled by my own sex;
it excites my jealousy and wounds my pride. It is
the iron sway of bodily force, which abases us, in
our compelled submission. But, how sweet the
free, generous courtesy, with which I would kneel
before a woman-ruler!"

"Yes; if
she were young and beautiful," said
Zenobia, laughing. "But how if she were sixty,
and a fright?"

"Ah; it
is you that rate womanhood low," said I.
"But let me go on. I have never found it possible
to suffer a bearded priest so near my heart and
conscience, as to do me any spiritual good. I
blush at the very thought! Oh, in the better
order of things, Heaven grant that the ministry of
souls may be left in charge of women! The gates
of the Blessed City will be thronged with the
multitude that enter in, when that day comes! The
task belongs to woman. God meant it for her. He
has endowed her with the religious sentiment in
its utmost depth and purity, refined from that
gross, intellectual alloy, with which every
masculine theologist--save only One, who merely
veiled Himself in mortal and masculine shape, but
was, in truth, divine--has been prone to mingle
it. I have always envied the Catholics their
faith in that sweet, sacred Virgin Mother, who
stands between them and the Deity, intercepting
somewhat of His awful splendor, but permitting His
love to stream upon the worshipper,more
intelligibly to human comprehension, through the
medium of a woman's tenderness. Have I not said
enough, Zenobia?"

"I cannot
think that this is true," observed
Priscilla, who had been gazing at me with great,
disapproving eyes. "And I am sure I do not wish
it to be true!"

"Poor child!"
exclaimed Zenobia, rather
contemptuously. "She is the type of womanhood,
such as man has spent centuries in making it. He
is never content, unless he can degrade himself by
stooping towards what he loves. In denying us our
rights, he betrays even more blindness to his own
interests, than profligate disregard of ours!"

"Is this
true?" asked Priscilla, with simplicity,
turning to Hollingsworth. "Is it all true that
Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have been saying?"

"No, Priscilla,"
answered Hollingsworth, with his
customary bluntness. "They have neither of them
spoken one true word yet."

"Do you
despise woman?" said Zenobia. "Ah,
Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"

"Despise her?--No!"
cried Hollingsworth, lifting
his great shaggy head and shaking it at us, while
his eyes glowed almost fiercely. "She is the most
admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and
character. Her place is at man's side. Her
office, that of the Sympathizer; the unreserved,
unquestioning Believer; the Recognition, withheld
in every other manner, but given, in pity, through
woman's heart, lest man should utterly lose faith
in himself; the Echo of God's own voice,
pronouncing--'It is well done!' All the separate
action of woman is, and ever has been, and always
shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her
own best and holiest qualities, void of every good
effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs!
Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a
monster--and, thank Heaven, an almost impossible
and hitherto imaginary monster--without man, as
her acknowledged principal! As true as I had once
a mother, whom I loved, were there any possible
prospect of woman's taking the social stand which
some of them--poor, miserable, abortive creatures,
who only dream of such things because they have
missed woman's peculiar happiness, or because
Nature made them really neither man nor woman!--if
there were a chance of their attaining the end
which these petticoated monstrosities have in
view, I would call upon my own sex to use its
physical force, that unmistakeable evidence of
sovereignty, to scourge them back within their
proper bounds! But it will not be needful. The
heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere
is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!"

Never was
mortal blessed--if blessing it
were--with a glance of such entire acquiescence
and unquestioning faith, happy in its
completeness, as our little Priscilla
unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth. She
seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into
her heart, and brood over it in perfect content.
The very woman whom he pictured--the gentle
parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful
existence--sat there at his feet.

I looked
at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her
to resent--as I felt, by the indignant ebullition
of my own blood, that she ought--this outrageous
affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of
masculine egotism. It centred everything in
itself, and deprived woman of her very soul, her
inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a
mere incident in the great sum of man.
Hollingsworth had boldly uttered what he, and
millions of despots like him, really felt.
Without intending it, he had disclosed the
well-spring of all these troubled waters. Now, if
ever, it surely behoved Zenobia to be the champion
of her sex.

But, to
my surprise, and indignation too, she only
looked humbled. Some tears sparkled in her eyes,
but they were wholly of grief, not anger.

"Well; be
it so," was all she said. "I, at least,
have deep cause to think you right. Let man be
but manly and godlike, and woman is only too ready
to become to him what you say!"

I smiled--somewhat
bitterly, it is true--in
contemplation of my own ill-luck. How little did
these two women care for me, who had freely
conceded all their claims, and a great deal more,
out of the fulness of my heart; while
Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his horrible
injustice, seemed to have brought them both to his
feet!

"Women almost
invariably behave thus!" thought I.
"What does the fact mean? Is it their nature? Or
is it, at last, the result of ages of compelled
degradation? And, in either case, will it be
possible ever to redeem them?"

An intuition
now appeared to possess all the
party, that, for this time, at least, there was no
more to be said. With one accord, we arose from
the ground, and made our way through the tangled
undergrowth towards one of those pleasant
wood-paths, that wound among the over-arching
trees. Some of the branches hung so low as partly
to conceal the figures that went before, from
those who followed. Priscilla had leaped up more
lightly than the rest of us, and ran along in
advance, with as much airy activity of spirit as
was typified in the motion of a bird, which
chanced to be flitting from tree to tree, in the
same direction as herself. Never did she seem so
happy as that afternoon. She skipt, and could not
help it, from very playfulness of heart.

Zenobia and
Hollingsworth went next, in close
contiguity, but not with arm in arm. Now, just
when they had passed the impending bough of a
birch-tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of
Hollingsworth in both her own, press it to her
bosom, and let it fall again!

The gesture
was sudden and full of passion; the
impulse had evidently taken her by surprise; it
expressed all! Had Zenobia knelt before him, or
flung herself upon his breast, and gasped out--'I
love you, Hollingsworth!'--I could not have been
more certain of what it meant. They then walked
onward, as before. But, methought, as the
declining sun threw Zenobia's magnified shadow
along the path, I beheld it tremulous; and the
delicate stem of the flower, which she wore in her
hair, was likewise responsive to her agitation.

Priscilla--through the
medium of her eyes, at
least--could not possibly have been aware of the
gesture above-described. Yet, at that instant, I
saw her droop. The buoyancy, which just before
had been so birdlike, was utterly departed; the
life seemed to pass out of her, and even the
substance of her figure to grow thin and gray. I
almost imagined her a shadow, fading gradually
into the dimness of the wood. Her pace became so
slow, that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by,
and I, without hastening my footsteps, overtook
her.

"Come, Priscilla,"
said I, looking her intently in
the face, which was very pale and sorrowful, "we
must make haste after our friends. Do you feel
suddenly ill? A moment ago, you flitted along so
lightly that I was comparing you to a bird. Now,
on the contrary, it is as if you had a heavy
heart, and very little strength to bear it with.
Pray take my arm!"

"No," said
Priscilla, "I do not think it would
help me. It is my heart, as you say, that makes
me heavy; and I know not why. Just now, I felt
very happy."

No doubt,
it was a kind of sacrilege in me to
attempt to come within her maidenly mystery. But
as she appeared to be tossed aside by her other
friends, or carelessly let fall, like a flower
which they had done with, I could not resist the
impulse to take just one peep beneath her folded
petals.

"Zenobia and
yourself are dear friends, of late,"
I remarked. "At first--that first evening when
you came to us--she did not receive you quite so
warmly as might have been wished."

"I remember
it," said Priscilla. "No wonder she
hesitated to love me, who was then a stranger to
her, and a girl of no grace or beauty; she being
herself so beautiful!"

"But she
loves you now, of course," suggested I.
"And, at this very instant, you feel her to be
your dearest friend?"

"Why do
you ask me that question?" exclaimed
Priscilla, as if frightened at the scrutiny into
her feelings which I compelled her to make. "It
somehow puts strange thoughts into my mind. But I
do love Zenobia dearly! If she only loves me half
as well, I shall be happy!"

"How is
it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?" I
rejoined. "But, observe how pleasantly and
happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are walking
together! I call it a delightful spectacle. It
truly rejoices me that Hollingsworth has found so
fit and affectionate a friend! So many people in
the world mistrust him--so many disbelieve and
ridicule, while hardly any do him justice, or
acknowledge him for the wonderful man he is--that
it is really a blessed thing for him to have won
the sympathy of such a woman as Zenobia. Any man
might be proud of that. Any man, even if he be as
great as Hollingsworth, might love so magnificent
a woman. How very beautiful Zenobia is! And
Hollingsworth knows it, too!"

There may
have been some petty malice in what I
said. Generosity is a very fine thing, at a
proper time, and within due limits. But it is an
insufferable bore, to see one man engrossing every
thought of all the women, and leaving his friend
to shiver in outer seclusion, without even the
alternative of solacing himself with what the more
fortunate individual has rejected. Yes; it was
out of a foolish bitterness of heart that I had
spoken.

"Go on
before!" said Priscilla, abruptly, and with
true feminine imperiousness, which heretofore I
had never seen her exercise. "It pleases me best
to loiter along by myself. I do not walk so fast
as you."

With her
hand, she made a little gesture of
dismissal. It provoked me, yet, on the whole, was
the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had ever
done. I obeyed her, and strolled moodily
homeward, wondering--as I had wondered a thousand
times, already--how Hollingsworth meant to dispose
of these two hearts, which (plainly to my
perception, and, as I could not but now suppose,
to his) he had engrossed into his own huge
egotism.

There was
likewise another subject, hardly less
fruitful of speculation. In what attitude did
Zenobia present herself to Hollingsworth? Was it
in that of a free woman, with no mortgage on her
affections nor claimant to her hand, but fully at
liberty to surrender both, in exchange for the
heart and hand which she apparently expected to
receive? But, was it a vision that I had
witnessed in the wood? Was Westervelt a goblin?
Were those words of passion and agony, which
Zenobia had uttered in my hearing, a mere
stage-declamation? Were they formed of a material
lighter than common air? Or, supposing them to
bear sterling weight, was it not a perilous and
dreadful wrong, which she was meditating towards
herself and Hollingsworth?

Arriving nearly
at the farm-house, I looked back
over the long slope of pasture-land, and beheld
them standing together, in the light of sunset,
just on the spot where, according to the gossip of
the Community, they meant to build their cottage.
Priscilla, alone and forgotten, was lingering in
the shadow of the wood.